Posts Tagged ‘Law Firm SEO Tips’

SEO Strategies to Boost Your Legal Website’s Organic Rankings

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

By now most of us are at least somewhat familiar with the SEO strategies used to boost our legal website up into the much-coveted first page place of honor. Because Google gets smarter almost by the hour, it continuously comes up with more advanced algorithms which strive to halt the use of so-called “black hat” SEO tactics, while encouraging the use of organic SEO. While the term “organic search” sounds a bit like something you might find at the Whole Foods market, it is simply the latest buzzword for a search which returns a ranking result based on keyword relevancy and overall content. This is in direct contrast to the listings which are based solely on who dug the deepest into their pockets to appear at the top. The idea of organic search rankings is to quickly return to the user the most relevant results based on the page’s content, the relevant links which point to the page and a smattering of other so-called “objective” criteria.

Advantages of Organic Law Firm SEO

The primary advantage of organic SEO is that we tend to trust the results more, and they are often much more relevant than sponsored results.  Organic searches typically will produce higher click-through rates for your legal website (all other things being equal) thereby maximizing traffic to your web pages. If there is a downside to organic SEO, it is simply one of time. Organic results rarely come quickly, rather build slowly but surely.

Of huge importance in legal web pages and legal web blogs is promoting your brand, and putting your resources into organic search results can give you a decided marketing edge in this area.  Most of us are skeptics when we see a television commercial, an ad on the Web or a sponsored ad on a search engine because we are fully aware that the ads are commercially motivated and may not yield us the results we are after.  Another high-ranking advantage of organic SEO is that it’s free! Google has remained adamant about not charging for inclusion in their index of billions of pages, therefore organic SEO is one of the few things which you really don’t have to pay for.

How to Boost Organic Search Engine Rankings

In order to fine-tune your legal web pages to the preferences of the major search engines, you must first know what each search engine is looking for, and why the law firm at the top of the page is able to hold that position week after week.  Some search engines tend to index more of your pages than others, meaning no two search engines will be analyzing exactly the same pages.

Location is Key, Keywords are Critical

Most search engines first consider the same aspect of those who sell real estate—location, location, location. In this instance location refers to where your keywords appear as well as how often your keywords appear in relation to other words on your legal web page. The assumption is that any page which is relevant to your overall topic will, of course, mention your keywords near the top of the page, in the headline and in the first few paragraphs of text. While your keywords are critical, if a search engine discovers you have repeated keywords hundreds of time in an effort to climb up the search engine ladder, it will judge your entire site to be spam. Such a slap on the wrist can be extremely hard to recover from, so use your keywords judiciously.

Other Important Considerations

Make sure your legal website is clean and easy to navigate—not only will your potential clients thank you, but the search engines will have a much easier time locating your legal web pages as well as all the sub-pages.  Take great pains to link each of your legal website or legal blog pages to other pages within your website if you don’t want your rankings to go down. High quality links which are directly relevant to your legal sites can strategically boost ratings; if you include relevant links from government or education sites, you will see a much quicker upswing. Finally, if you have a clear theme which runs through each page of your site, you stand a better chance of a good ranking.

Headlines and Copy

And, of course, nobody reaches the ranks of the privileged few at the top without clear, keyword rich headlines in strategic locations, and high-quality content which boasts keywords scattered naturally throughout the pages rather than appearing as though they have been artificially added. Your copy must be enticing, unique, and optimized all at once. The longer your site has been around, the more authoritative it is judged to be, at least by the search engines, so make sure you are abiding by the basic rules of organic SEO, and be patient. Soon, you will be rewarded by your law firm’s site popping up on the very first page of the search, and you will be out of the choppy waters and into smooth sailing.

Call us today for a free discuss about your law firm website at (769) 218-6099.

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Why the Ethical Use of Law Firm SEO is Important

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

SEO is a technique which is widely used to make your legal website or blog more visible in an environment (the Internet) where there are already plenty of websites with the exact same type of law firm or legal specialty as your own. Most research will tell you that if you want to get the desired traffic to your legal website or blog, you need to be within the top 10 in the search engines. As you probably already know, however, competition to be in that top 10 is fierce, and staying there once you’ve made it is just as difficult.

SEO crosses the barriers between search engines, as they all operate by the SEO Bible, and allow your business to attract more of the “perfect” client, thus increasing your offline business. If your law firm has spent thousands—or more—creating the highest quality, most creative legal website around, but have left it running in an un-optimized manner, then you are simply spinning your wheels on the Internet. In older advertising terms it is something like have the most fabulous sign made up for your firm, then sticking it in the storeroom, where obviously your targeted clients will never see it.

While SEO is imperative, ethical SEO is critical for natural or organic search engine rankings. Major search engines such as Google are highly developed and able to easily understand the credibility of SEO techniques. By the same token, they can quickly identify unethical search engine techniques, with a potential consequence of blacklisting your website or even banning it. While “black hat” techniques can boost your search engine rankings quickly, in the long run it is a bad choice. In case you are unclear about what constitutes “black hat” techniques, here are some of the most common:

  • Keyword stuffing involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your meta tags, comment tags, alt tags or the actual copy on your website. Repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within each 200 words.
  • Inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engines but cannot be seen by your human visitors is not good use of SEO. All search engines consider these hidden text and links to be spam and will penalize the page, or possibly the entire site.
  • Cloaking involves a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages which are created to “trick” the spider and re-direct the user—while cloaking can have some proper uses, by and large it is used to deceive search engines, and is therefore considered spam.
  • Creating mirror sites or duplicate content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names, and search engines will not only suppress duplicate content but will also count them as a violation of the search engine’s spam guidelines.
  • Link farming refers to putting hundreds of links on one page to sites which are essentially unrelated to your site content and can contain poor quality content that is useless to your potential clients. Reciprocal links can associate you with “poor neighborhoods,” so you should avoid link farming at all cost.
  • Irrelevant link exchange is often considered unethical SEO, and no matter how tactfully or carefully you hide them, hiding repetitive keywords is also considered unethical.

These types of spam can cause your firm to lose your rankings and be booted off the search engine index; while search engines have varying rules for spam detection, the end result will be the same, and it can be extremely difficult for your firm to recover from a ban, which is why ethical SEO is so critical.  Used correctly on your legal website or blog, proper search engine optimization techniques will almost certainly get you ranked higher in the search engines, and achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. Acquire your search engine rankings fairly, and maintain them ethically for far-reaching positive results.

FREE LAW FIRM SEO ADVICE AND TIPS – Call (769) 218-6099 for a free consultation with a one of the best law firm SEO experts with an 11 year track record of success.

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